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her wee ones to bed. She was speaking to her, thanking her in a low voice. My mother’s face: dreadful tears, smeared with snot and foamy saliva, hair tumbling. She pleaded with her. She should no longer turn away from our family. She needed to be there, always. Okay? Promise? Promise me, Mary! Promise me!
    Lawrence took his trembling sister by the shoulders and folded her into his chest.

    In the morning, I walked with Seánie and my uncle through Belfast for the first time in my life. The silence was shattered, the city turned upside down. All around you could hear the sound of glass, of shifting steel, fallen rubble. We stumbled amongst the blocks, the piles of bricks, the wood ripped away from timber structures. Beams blocked off avenues, lying between electricity poles and tram cables. The post-catastrophe dust lay over everything. White and grey smoke, fire flickering beneath the ruins. At the centre of vacant lots, bombs had hollowed out craters that were now filled with muddy water. We came across a car engulfed by a fountain of street. Men were wandering around, hands black, sooty faces, trousers and coats covered in ash. Others were standing at crossroads, beyond alone, speechless, their gaze devastated. There were very few women about. We heard the occasional uneven clopping of a horse passing, or a wheelbarrow. The locals clattered along on bicycles, matching the rhythm of the surrounding cacophony. Some students were standing in front of a building whose facade was missing, shovels in their hands. Four of them in medical-faculty uniform were carrying a wounded person.
    And then I saw my first casualty of war, a few feet away. One arm was sticking out from under a blanket on a stretcher that lay on the ground. A woman’s arm, her nightdress melted onto her flesh. Seánie put a hand over my eyes. I shook him off.
    —Let him look, my uncle told him.
    I looked. The arm of the woman, her hand with its painted nails, skin hanging from the elbow to the wrist like a torn sleeve. We passed very close to her. The shape of the head underneath the fabric, her chest and then nothing, the blanket sagged from around the level of her waist. No legs left. In the street a newspaper vendor was selling the Belfast Telegraph . He was yelling about the hundreds dead, the thousand wounded. As for me, I saw an arm. I didn’t cry. I did the same as everyone else who passed. I touched my index and middle fingers to my forehead, chest, left shoulder, right shoulder. In the name of the Father and all the others. I decided to no longer be a child.

    On Jennymount Street there was a man playing the piano, sitting on a wooden chair. The instrument had been rescued from the blaze and pulled outside, with its film of ash and debris. A few children had drawn near, their mothers with them, and some soldiers, too. I knew that song. I’d often heard it on Irish radio. ‘Guilty’, a love song.
    If it’s a crime then I’m guilty, guilty of loving you ...
    The musician was making faces. Winking. He was imitating Al Bowlly, the Killybegs girls’ favourite singer.
    —Pity he isn’t Irish, my mother had said one day.
    —Good job he isn’t, my father had responded.
    And he would turn the dial on the radio that sat on the counter of Mullin’s. It was a game they played. My father would have challenged Bowlly at singing if he could, him with his gravelly voice, Bowlly with his honey.
    —The voice of a eunuch, Padraig Meehan used to say.
    He was wrong, and he knew it. But nothing British was allowed to offend our ears. Neither order nor song.
    London was bombed two days after Belfast, on 17 April. Al Bowlly died in his home, blown up by a parachute mine. His ballad was aired on the BBC as a funeral hymn.

    In front of a gutted house on the Crumlin Road, a crowd was gathered around several firemen. They weren’t wearing firemen shoes and their coats were drenched by the fire hoses.
    —Those are Irishmen from Ireland! a man shouted.
    Their